Pearl Harbor injured arrive in S.F. on Christmas Day

Gary Kamiya

Published 4:18 pm, Friday, December 6, 2013

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Pearl Harbor evacuees were met with doughnuts, coffee, toys for the children Ð the Chronicle ran this wrenching picture of a bewildered-looking little girl clutching a rag doll on Friday, December 26, 1941, Ð and provided housing and support for families. PTA members volunteered to help the evacuees, and the Army Nursing Service put out an urgent appeal for trained nurses to report immediately for service at 1136 Eddy Street.

Pearl Harbor evacuees were met with doughnuts, coffee, toys for the children Ð the Chronicle ran this wrenching picture of a bewildered-looking little girl clutching a rag doll on Friday, December 26, 1941,

Families from Pearl Harbor are brought to San Francisco after the Japanese attack on the base.

Families from Pearl Harbor are brought to San Francisco after the Japanese attack on the base.

Photo: San Francisco Chronicle Archive, The Chronicle

Pearl Harbor injured arrive in S.F. on Christmas Day

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At 7 a.m. on a rainy Christmas Day in 1941, several camouflaged U.S. ships approached the Golden Gate, carrying the nation's first casualties of World War II.

The convoy had sailed in secret, and no one in San Francisco had been notified of its arrival. It had been just 18 days since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but the West Coast, which many feared would be the next target, was already on wartime footing.

On board the largest luxury liner built in the U.S., the President Coolidge - now painted dark blue - and a smaller Army transport were 180 men who had been badly wounded at Pearl Harbor, as well as women and children being evacuated from Hawaii. In an effort to avoid an attack by Japanese submarines, the ships had slipped out of Oahu with their lights blacked out. Cruisers and destroyers were with them.

The first San Franciscans to see the convoy, and the warplanes flying guard over it, were probably early risers out for a Christmas stroll. Word quickly spread: Ships were coming in the Golden Gate.

Looking for family

Soon, thousands of people were making their way to the rain-drenched waterfront. Among them were family members of servicemen and women who had been at Pearl Harbor, who wondered whether their loved ones were on board. Many stateside families still had no idea whether their relatives had survived the attack.

In the city's long maritime history, no other arrival through the Golden Gate was so momentous.

When the crowds got within three blocks of the waterfront, they were turned away at barricades by rifle-carrying soldiers and sailors. "Mothers who were wondering whether their sons were aboard stood in the steady drizzle, watching with hopeful eyes as the passengers emerged," The Chronicle reported.

One woman asked a sailor, "Do you know whether Johnny Thompson is aboard? He was an aircraft gunner ... or something."

"I don't know nobody," the sailor replied.

Doughnut greetings

A stream of ambulances passed through the barricades, heading for the naval hospital at Mare Island.

Although the city was kept in the dark about the exact time of the convoy's arrival, many people had been placed on standby. Along with the Red Cross, members of the National League for Women's Service, the Women's City Club, the Western Women's Club and the Women's Athletic Club answered the call.

They greeted the evacuees with doughnuts, coffee, toys for the children - The Chronicle ran a wrenching photo of a bewildered-looking little girl clutching a rag doll - and provided housing and support for families.

PTA members volunteered to help the evacuees, and the Army Nursing Service put out an urgent appeal for nurses to report immediately for service.

Few knew the severity of the wounds suffered by the men aboard the President Coolidge and the Army transport ship Gen. Hugh L. Scott. One who did was Lt. Ruth Erickson, a Navy nurse at the Pearl Harbor Naval Hospital. She was one of three Navy nurses who, along with several Army corpsmen, were pressed into emergency service aboard the President Coolidge, taking care of the 125 wounded men the ship carried.

In an oral history, she recalled that on the day of the attack, "the first patient came into our dressing room at 8:25 a.m. with a large opening in his abdomen and bleeding profusely. They started an intravenous and transfusion. I can still see the tremor of Dr. Brunson's hand as he picked up the needle. Everyone was terrified. The patient died within the hour. Then the burned patients streamed in."

The burned men had come from the battleship Nevada, which had tried to make it out of the inner harbor but had run aground. Erickson recalled, "There was heavy oil on the water and the men dived off the ship and swam through these waters to Hospital Point, not too great a distance, but when one is burned ... how they ever managed, I'll never know.

"The tropical dress at the time was white T-shirts and shorts. The burns began where the pants ended. Bared arms and faces were plentiful. Personnel retrieved a supply of flit guns from stock. We filled these with tannic acid to spray burned bodies. Then we gave these gravely injured patients sedatives for their intense pain."

Only the most critically wounded were aboard the convoy that sailed for San Francisco on Dec. 19. As Erickson recalled, "The command decided that patients who would need more than three months' treatment should be transferred. Some were very bad and probably should not have been moved." One severely burned older man died the day before the ship reached San Francisco Bay.

Sightseeing for war

Although that Christmas was a day of high drama in San Francisco, it ended with an episode of low comedy.

From Dec. 18 to 24, Japanese submarines had attacked eight U.S. merchant ships off the West Coast, sinking two and damaging two others. Many San Franciscans were convinced there would be an epic offshore battle on Christmas Day, and after consuming their turkey, they headed to the coast to get front-row seats.

"Beaches were lined for miles with sightseers hoping that a submarine-tanker battle might develop offshore for their personal entertainment," The Chronicle reported. "Traffic was so heavy on the beach that extra police cars were sent to the Cliff House vicinity to handle the traffic snarls." Fortunately for the nation, everyone left without witnessing an attack.

It was the day the war came home to San Francisco, and the city would never see another Christmas like it.

Editor's note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya's Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.

Trivia time

Last week's trivia question: Where did Allen Ginsberg and the other poets who read at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street go to eat after the epochal "Howl" reading on Oct. 7, 1955?

This week's trivia question: What San Francisco street runs the longest distance without being interrupted by a cross street?

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling new book "Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco." E-mail: metro@sfchronicle.com

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